Camping

In the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, Rat is the most unpleasant character, someone who is rude, self-centered, and cynical. So it is disturbing how often I find myself agreeing with him.

(Pearls Before Swine)

Actually, I did go camping once. Just after we completed college, a group of a dozen friends spent a week on a beautiful, isolated stretch of beach in Sri Lanka. I had a lot of fun but part of the enjoyment for me was the novelty. Now it is a case of ‘been there, done that’ with no desire to repeat that experience, though some of my friends on that trip continued to enjoy going camping all their lives.

Bob Newhart cracks up Dean Martin

Actor and singer Dean Martin, early in his career, was part of a comedy duo with Jerry Lewis, where he played the straight man to the more antic Lewis. Later he hosted a live variety TV show. Bob Newhart was a great comedian, known for his hesitant manner and his deadpan delivery. On one occasion, he was a guest on Martin’s show and they did a sketch together. Legend has it that Martin never rehearsed for his show but simply read his lines from the off-screen cue cards, sometimes seeing them for the first time while on live TV.

On this occasion, he clearly did not anticipate how funny Newhart could be and you can see the result.

More pun fun

It’s been a while since the Pearls Before Swine strip had one of those puns with a convoluted set up that you know is coming from the first panel.

(Pearls Before Swine)

UPDATE: I realized that some people may not be old enough to know the song being referred to so here is a music video of the Village People doing their hit.

There is no dark side of the moon

This comic illustrates a common misconception, that there is a side of the Moon that is in permanent darkness.

(WuMo)

In reality, as the Moon orbits the Earth, any hemisphere (‘side’) experiences equal amounts of sunlight and darkness, just like the Earth. What is true is that due to tidal forces caused by the Earth, the Moon is ‘locked’ with the Earth so that only one side faces the Earth at all times. As a result, it experiences cycles of two weeks of sunlight and two weeks of darkness as it orbits the Earth.

So while there is no dark side, there is such a thing as the ‘far side’ of the Moon that we cannot see from the Earth. The USSR space probe Luna 3 was the first to photograph the far side in 1959.

I am not sure when the notion that the Moon has a permanent dark side originated. Historically, the ‘dark side of the Moon’ was used colloquially (and correctly) to mean ‘hidden’ or ‘unseen’ but at some point became popularly associated with ‘unlit’. That idea may have gained popularity from the massive success of the 1973 Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon, although this was an allusion to lunacy and has nothing to do with astronomy.